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Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

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Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#41

Post by threetonesun »

azangru wrote: post #30
extraisland wrote: post #27

I totally disagree with his conclusion that companies want their website to be faster. They only care about performance issues if it causes a problem . If it does not, they couldn't care less.

> I totally disagree with his conclusion that companies want their website to be faster But what do web developers want? What do web designers want? Some developers pride themselved on being craftsmen. They would write tests. They would design architectures. Why wouldn't they want websites they are building to be faster?

As a web developer who also uses web sites I care less about speed than I do usability. Most of the time I'm on a 1Gbps+ connection, all I want is your site flows to make sense and any actions I take to be reliable and clearly handle errors. For things that are truly critical I want 99% of my UI to be precached by a native application, so we're only talking in data (and yes, keep that data small).

There are lots of good reasons to make your website faster, but given the number of sites I've seen that fall over and die if you block Google Analytics, I don't feel that it's the biggest issue most websites have.

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#42

Post by [deleted] »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #10

“conservatively $435,000,000 per year” But how much would it cost to have a few senior engineers fix it, and ensure zero mistakes or missing functionality while doing it? Even if I were CTO of Kroger… nope. I’m not doing it. I’m not spending months of engineer effort to save $435K, unless there’s proof of greater savings. EDIT: Yes, I terribly misread that this is million, not thousand, which makes a lot more sense e…

[deleted]

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#43

Post by gjsman-1000 »

gwd wrote: post #37
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #10

“conservatively $435,000,000 per year” But how much would it cost to have a few senior engineers fix it, and ensure zero mistakes or missing functionality while doing it? Even if I were CTO of Kroger… nope. I’m not doing it. I’m not spending months of engineer effort to save $435K, unless there’s proof of greater savings. EDIT: Yes, I terribly misread that this is million, not thousand, which makes a lot more sense e…

> I’m not spending months of engineer effort to save $435K Would you do it to save 1000x that much? Because you're missing 3 zeroes.

That would make a lot more sense (pardon my misreading)…

… but at the same time, I don’t believe for a second this actually causes a $435M loss. There are way too many assumptions - for example, if people are ordering groceries, they are way more tolerant of delays for needs than, say, the latest TV deal.

The loss that it causes on conversion rate for a brand new company trying to get leads does not track with buying oatmeal.

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#44

Post by robviren »

What am I gonna do, leave my bank because the website loaded slow? Get tickets through some other option? Order differ food because it took 10 seconds to load a menu? I hate the slow web so much, but it just gets lost in the churn of life. I'd just as soon not buy something because the logo was silly or they have weeds growing in their side walk. I respect a well engineered site but most don't.

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#45

Post by rossdavidh »

1) among non-tech decision makers, it's hard to keep out excess features and excess content, because that means most people don't get their pet project onto the website. The compromise is "everything goes in", which gives everybody a successful project that they can point to (successful in the sense that it got on the website)

2) among tech decision-makers, i.e. alpha developers and young hotshots, the urge to use what FAANG uses was very strong, because that's how you get the trendy tech on your resume. Basically the same at (1), above, but for developers.

Exacerbating this is that each additional thing is only a small part of the problem: "No single raindrop believes it is responsible for the flood"

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#46

Post by nchmy »

> each KB of JavaScript sent to the client was costing the company $100,000 per year. How much is Kroger sending today? 2.4 Megabytes. Out of a chonky 4 MB payload. Assuming they could rebuild the site to hit a target of 450 KB, that's conservatively $435,000,000 per year.

This math isn't mathing for me, no matter how I slice it. Can someone help?

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#47

Post by StopVibeCoding »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #43
gwd wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m not spending months of engineer effort to save $435K Would you do it to save 1000x that much? Because you're missing 3 zeroes.

That would make a lot more sense (pardon my misreading)… … but at the same time, I don’t believe for a second this actually causes a $435M loss. There are way too many assumptions - for example, if people are ordering groceries, they are way more tolerant of delays for needs than, say, the latest TV deal. The loss that it causes on conversion rate for a brand new company trying to get leads does not track with buying…

for a company the size of kroger, $435M is an extremely conservative loss. If someone did proper research and determined that it's 3x, maybe 4x that much I would belive them.

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#48

Post by ben_w »

extraisland wrote: post #29
torginus wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree - it's often engineering's fault. It's been pretty consistent that a decently specced server, running PHP that was written sometime last century, generating static pages, redis cache in front, and serving static content via nginx, beats the everloving pants off whatever fotm microservice SPA monstrosity modern devs tend to come up with. The most hilarious if you go to pirate sites (for stuff like comics, m…

A lot of companies seem to architect their web apps to deal with millions of users. When in reality they may have a couple of hundred hitting the site at once. This explodes the cost of development and it makes current web development miserable IME. I am forced to deal with everything being totally overengineered when a Flask app with a PostgresSQL backend could probably do the job on a reasonably priced VPS.

If it's done right, "millions" of users is something you can serve on racks of machines specced from the late 00s with all the commensurate sysadmin tools.

It's just that "done right" means the web pages are actually crafted to be what they need, and there's none of the modern extras like 1850 ad tracking agencies all being copied in, nor an ad server injecting just about anything…

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#49

Post by ben_w »

nchmy wrote: post #46

> each KB of JavaScript sent to the client was costing the company $100,000 per year. How much is Kroger sending today? 2.4 Megabytes. Out of a chonky 4 MB payload. Assuming they could rebuild the site to hit a target of 450 KB, that's conservatively $435,000,000 per year. This math isn't mathing for me, no matter how I slice it. Can someone help?

I also think they made a mistake, but it doesn't look like a huge one?

4 MB ~= 4000 kB, (4000 kB - 450 kB) * $100,000/kB/year = $355,000,000/year

(With a bit of fiddling to get the same answer as them, I think they may have done this: (4000 kB + 350 kB) * $100,000/kB, though I wouldn't want to guess why this error happened).

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#50

Post by sgarland »

extraisland wrote: post #29
torginus wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree - it's often engineering's fault. It's been pretty consistent that a decently specced server, running PHP that was written sometime last century, generating static pages, redis cache in front, and serving static content via nginx, beats the everloving pants off whatever fotm microservice SPA monstrosity modern devs tend to come up with. The most hilarious if you go to pirate sites (for stuff like comics, m…

A lot of companies seem to architect their web apps to deal with millions of users. When in reality they may have a couple of hundred hitting the site at once. This explodes the cost of development and it makes current web development miserable IME. I am forced to deal with everything being totally overengineered when a Flask app with a PostgresSQL backend could probably do the job on a reasonably priced VPS.

They cosplay as architecting them that way. IMO, one of the largest negative consequences to EverythingAsAService is that it allows people with little to no experience administering and tuning systems to run complex pieces of software. Sure, you can go spin up a managed Kafka cluster with a few clicks, but that means you can skip reading the docs, which means that you likely have no idea how to use it (or even when you should use it). Case in point for that: the number of people who think Kafka is a message queue.

This is also a huge contributor to the curse of Full Stack Engineering. “Full Stack” should mean that you have significant experience with and knowledge of every system and language you’re interacting with (I’ll give systems administration a pass for the sake of argument). For most web apps, that means frontend and backend, as well as some flavor of RDBMS, some flavor of caching, and likely a message queue. It likely also means you need to understand distributed systems. The number of developers I’ve met who tick all of those boxes is zero. Honestly, as soon as you include an RDBMS, it’s game over for most. Yes, you can get away with horrible things via ORMs, but as soon as you start hitting scaling limits, you’ll discover what people have known for decades: databases are tricky, and chucking everything into JSON columns with UUID PKs isn’t a good idea.

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